


Lights Abound

by fiendingforthesunshine



Series: The Disabled Military Veteran AU [2]
Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Blind Character, Blindness, Brendon and his little brother have a brotherly moment together, Christmas Fluff, Disability, Gen, Mentions of PTSD, Military veteran
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 14:43:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3071954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiendingforthesunshine/pseuds/fiendingforthesunshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Brendon’s first Christmas back from Iraq and more importantly his first Christmas where he can't see anything. His family has this stupid thing about going to see Christmas lights and Brendon isn’t allowed to skip.</p><p>*Set 2 years before Stars and Glitter*</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lights Abound

**Author's Note:**

> This is set probably 5 or 6 months after Brendon was honorably discharged from the military. You'll probably want to have an idea of what happened in Stars and Glitter to understand this but it probably could be read as one shot. 
> 
> I wrote this pretty fast because soon it won't be acceptable to write Christmas stories and I've wanted to write this for a few weeks but I had to wait until I finished Stars and Glitter for my own mind's sake. Enjoy!

Brendon was not depressed, thank you very much. He’d talked to his therapist twice a week since he’d gotten out of rehab, he was signed up for music classes at the local community college, he was working his way through the stages of grief or whatever anyone else wanted to call it. 

He was fine. 

He was fine, he just didn’t want to get dragged all the way downtown to go see Christmas lights that he couldn’t see. Or. Well. Fuck. 

People at the VA were always asking him what he could and couldn’t see. If things were just black or white or nothing and Brendon felt like maybe he was talking to people who had never had one of their senses impaired before. 

When Brendon was a kid he had to wear glasses because he couldn’t see things like the chalkboard at school and the letters on the wall that an eye doctor had brought into the school office. The first time he put the glasses on things showed up that hadn’t shown up before. Leaves on the trees, animal shapes in the clouds, and the little swirly things on the wallpaper in his mom and dad’s bathroom. 

It wasn’t that Brendon didn’t know those things were there, he did. He had held leaves close to his face after they’d fallen from the trees and he’d read books about clouds and he used to run his fingers along the swirls on the wallpaper. It was just when things were too far away it was almost like they faded into a giant finger painting. 

That was kind of the problem now, if Brendon could compare his blindness to anything. 

He could tell when the lights were on in a room and if the sun was out instead of it being cloudy but he couldn’t see if he was about to walk into the couch or the difference between his mom’s van and the florist’s van at the grocery store. And really, those were the bigger issues here. 

The VA thought it was good that he could tell changes in light intensity. The VA also thought it was good that Brendon hadn’t tried to beat anyone up in two weeks so their standards were pretty low. 

Brendon’s parent’s standards, however, were occasionally much higher. Brendon didn’t have to decorate the Christmas tree when his dad had lugged it down from the attic, but he was required to at least be in the room while his parents and Michael decorated it. 

He also had to go downtown with them on Christmas Eve after church so the whole family could go see the Christmas lights and decorations. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do the regular Christmas stuff with his family. He was trying really hard to catch up on everything he’d missed in Michael’s first five years of life; he wanted to be with them. He just. 

Crowds were a thing. 

Brendon could handle a classroom, and he could usually handle the grocery store but the idea of walking through downtown with loud people and screaming children didn’t seem like the best idea even though he’d been out of Iraq for almost half a year. Even sometimes in the grocery store or walking on campus Brendon could taste the dust of the desert and hear missiles whizzing through the air. Brendon could only imagine the types of things his brain could create walking through the glitz of downtown. 

Brendon’s therapist was an asshole, though, and told his parents that it was perfectly acceptable to require Brendon to attend this family event. 

Brendon still had three days to find a way to weasel out of this requirement. After he was pretty sure that everyone was asleep he wandered down the hallway and into the living room, his fingers barely grazing the wall and his feet sliding against the tile just to be sure he wouldn’t trip over anything. 

One the first night the tree was up Brendon’s parents liked to leave the lights on all night instead of turning them off when they went to bed which helped Brendon out a great deal. He could tell the difference just barely in the dark between the brightness of the Christmas tree and the darkness of everything else in the room. He maybe only bumped into the couch and the coffee table. 

Brendon eased down to his knees and then situated himself under the tree, stretching his legs out until they were almost touching his dad’s lounger. He reached his hand up to grab one of the lights, bumping his hand into a round ornament before he could pull the bulb down closer to himself. 

Brendon pulled down a bulb that was on the string next to the first light and blinked a few times before bringing that one closer. 

“Bren?” A voice whispered from the darkness in the living room. It was obviously Michael, no one else in the house sounded like a cartoon character when they tried to whisper. 

“Hey, Mikey. Did I wake you up?” Brendon asked, rolling his head towards his brother’s voice, letting go of the lights and patting the ground next to him. 

“I dunno,” Brendon could picture the kindergartener shrugging and then he heard the pitter patter of his feet across the carpet, “What’re you doing?” 

Brendon waited until he felt Michael lying on the floor next to him and pointed towards the tree, “I used to lay under the tree sometimes when mom and dad went to bed. It’s the best way to look at it, didn’t you know?” 

“You can’t see it though,” Michael stated with all his five-year-old knowledge. 

Michael was a little confused as to what was acting going on with his older brother most of the time. As a toddler he knew he had an older brother, an older brother that he saw on skype but never in real life because he was busy fighting bad guys. 

When Brendon came home it took a long time for Michael to figure out that this real life version of Brendon couldn’t see him, couldn’t see his toys or play on the Wii with him. So understandably he was confused that Brendon would be able to even do anything with the tree. 

“I can, kind of. I can feel it,” Brendon felt for Michael’s tiny hand and put it around one of the ornaments that his mom always put near the bottom, “See? This one is a star. And I know the lights are on the tree but I don’t know the colors. You know your colors, right?” 

Michael nodded his head up and down on the carpet. Brendon moved to one of the light blubs he’d been toying with before, “What color is this one?” 

“It’s red.” 

Brendon tried to catalog what he knew about the color red together with how it felt now. It looked hot, the way the sun did when Brendon was stupid enough to look directly at it. It reminded him of atomic fireballs and he could almost taste the heat from the candy as he looked at the light longer. 

Brendon let go of that light and pulled down the next one, “What about this one?” 

“Blue.” 

Blue was cool. Brendon almost couldn’t tell that there was a light in front of him now. Blue fit in with the darkness around the room, only it was just a little bit more noticeable. 

“Are you gonna come see the lights with us?” Michael asked, running his fingers along the tree branch. 

Brendon shrugged, “Think you could tell me about the colors when we get there? I’ll pay you back in candy.” 

Michael thought for a minute, “I like Twix.” 

“I know,” Brendon reached for another light blub, “What color is this one?”


End file.
